The paper trail

Three terrible exasperations in a person's life are (1) having the electricity go off; (2) finding an oil slick under your car; and (3) running out of toilet paper at the wrong time.

One of life's most useful but least discussed items is toilet paper.

As a cartoon on the Internet says, "Life is like toilet paper: the closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes."

We take the existence of toilet paper for granted and have pretty much forgotten about the days of catalogs, newspapers, leaves, corncobs, and other alternatives available in most outhouses.

In a book titled "In the Beginning," it is said toilet paper is 2,000 years old, probably first used by an ancient Chinese emperor. And all that time we thought the Chinese were busy making paper lanterns and tiny paper umbrellas.

Paper was made from old rags, which were shredded, beaten into a pulp, boiled, then rolled into paper. In early America, cloth was very scarce and had to be imported, which made paper expensive.

Americans found ways to recycle paper so that it could be used more than once. The Farmers' Almanac and Sears Roebuck catalogs, as well as newsprint, were commonly used in outhouses as an alternative toilet paper. When Sears started printing their catalog on slick paper, customers actually complained.

The first toilet paper in America was sold in pharmacies as a therapeutic product saturated with aloe. Some products nowadays come with lotion or aloe, which sounds like pretty much the same thing to me. The first paper company to produce toilet paper on rolls was the Scott Paper Company. It was such an unmentionable product at the time that they refused to put their name on it and packaged it under the name of the buyers, such as the Waldorf Hotel. Eventually, Scott purchased the name and Waldorf became the most popular brand name sold.

As other companies got into the business, manufacturers began to look for more economical ways to produce paper. Since trees were plentiful, they discovered that chipping up wood, boiling it into a pulp, bleaching, drying, and rolling it made a satisfactory paper. Northern tissue became successful by advertising its product as "splinter free."

Also successful was Charmin, whose advertising campaign featured Mr. Whipple and "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." In his time, Mr. Whipple was almost as widely known as Richard Nixon or Billy Graham.

Tissue paper is made soft by a process called "creping," which scrapes paper off large rollers and leaves small wrinkles, making it flexible while lowering density. At first all tissue was one-ply or one layer thick. Then it was found that two thinner layers of tissue were softer and two-ply tissue became standard.

In 1973 there was a consumer-created shortage of toilet paper when comedian Johnny Carson made a joke about the U.S. running out of toilet paper. People panicked and rushed to the stores, buying out supplies to hoard. Even though Carson later apologized and said there was no shortage, it took about three weeks to replenish supplies.

Toilet paper now comes in a variety of textures, colors, and scents. It is sometimes used for handkerchiefs, napkins, cleaning glasses, blotting lipstick, and many other things besides the use for which it is intended.

Whether you call it toilet paper, toilet tissue, bathroom tissue, TP, or something else, it is one of our most necessary household products--unmentionable or not.

A popular country singer remarked on TV about a year ago that if you're a patriotic American, you will use just one sheet at a sitting.